I wish the journalist had asked more about this seemingly alarming statistic:
"Zendrive now has its monitoring technology on 60 million phones, roughly one of every four U.S. drivers"
For example:
How did this "monitoring technology" get on 60M phones? Do the owners know it's there? Is it hidden in other apps? Is there clear disclosure of its existence in those apps? What is done with this data? Who has access? Is it anonymized? Is it sold to third parties? Is it used for advertising or other non-safety-related purposes? How do they distinguish between drivers and passengers? What do they do about COPPA if it's on the phone of an under-13-year-old? Etc.
Indeed! Unless this is a part of Google Maps, Waze, Uber, or Lyft, some extremely popular app on our phones is doing location and activity monitoring no one was aware of. It's especially frightening because this data could be used to deny people reasonable insurance rates in the future and they weren't even aware they were being logged.
I'm curious how they know a person is definitely driving and not a passenger.
> It's especially frightening because this data could be used to deny people reasonable insurance rates in the future and they weren't even aware they were being logged.
More expensive insurance is getting off easy. After getting caught two or three times people should lose their license over it, IMO. It's as dangerous as drunk driving.
That said, it is concerning how they're collecting this information.
If I'm driving down the road with a phone held to my ear, a giant soda in the other hand, and steering with my knees, and I happen to pass a police officer, I hope they'd be allowed to stop me. I shouldn't be able to hide behind "I was in my private car, you had no right to look in on me and observe my behavior there."
If I'm driving down the road with a phone held to my ear, a giant soda in the other hand, and steering with my knees, and I happen to pass a police officer, I hope they'd be allowed to stop me
Some expectation of privacy probably applies to conversations inside the car. Also, there might be a different way to think about the entire record of behavior of where one drives. Neither of those would interfere with policing of the behavior you cite.
There should be a lot of signals to perceive where the user is sitting. If the phone is resting in the center console, the accelerometers can tell whether it is being lifted up to the right or to the left of the car whenever it is being used. It could tell whether it is resting in the center console or the left or right side of the car depending on the shape of arc, distance travelled, centrifugal forces whenever the car follows the road around a left vs. a right turn.
If they care about accuracy to put in the engineering investment, it could be right a very high percentage of the time.
My phone sometimes insists I'm driving on water. I don't believe you can tell the difference between drivers and passengers seats without in car sensors.
They can tell by which way you enter the car. This is problematic since women commonly put their purse in the passenger seat sometimes via the passenger door.
You can easily be off by meters or even 10s of meters in terms of the position of the phone.
You have no way to know the position of the car in relation.
You would need car sensors and per car interior data and even then it would likely confuse a driver holding a phone in their right hand and a passenger holding it in their left.
You talk about the phone keeping track of where the phone not only is but was historically in order to guess if you are driving and texting and I hear you want to design a broken system that is not even deterministically broken.
It also fails to account for people passing a phone around to someone else in the car.
I wouldn't be able to give my phone to a passenger because it would already have decided it is a a driver's phone.
Your users will only be able to use your phone if they can reverse engineer what their phone thinks they are doing.
Anyone who does not charge their phone will see car travel destroy their battery life.
One can trivially avoid such a feature by disabling GPS but most people won't have to worry about it because they just won't pay hundreds of dollars more for a phone that randomly doesn't work even in the passenger seat because it's incorrectly second guessing you.
Being able to detect which lane of the road you are on is still challenging enough for self-drive technology. A cheap phone sensor most likely doesn't have such spatial resolution.
There are probably simpler ways - for example, if an accident report states there was only one person in the car, it was probably the driver using his phone.
My wife and I have different phones and have consistently found the map experience better on mine. When we travel I drive and she uses my phone to navigate...
As a matter of practicality using this data adversely against customers is unlikely.
1. This is literally almost everyone on the road (that should frighten you more than insurance companies having this data)
2. Insurance is a highly regulated industry. Each state has a department of insurance that regulates how insurers apply rate and underwriting.
3. There are many voluntary opt-in programs out there that reward good behavior and marginally penalize bad behavior. Those programs focus on a few behaviors, none of which are distraction at the moment and they are all opt-in.
Full disclosure - I work at a large insurance company and am also an EFF donor. This is near and dear.
It is virtually guaranteed that this data will be used adversely against customers. Insurances want to find reasons why not to pay out, and will find those reasons in the data they collect.
Insurance may be "highly regulated" but regulation on what data can be collected is underdeveloped.
Helping them and everyone else find behavioral solutions to avoid using their phone while driving, for example rewarding good behavior with discount, gift cards, etc.
There are a number of insurance companies literally trying to help adjust behavior in order to save lives of those distracted and the innocent bystanders and other drivers on the road.
Honestly they could start by building voice controls that people want to use rather than the voice assistant bullshit. Idk what the google one is like, but siri is a toy.
You don't even need general purpose speech recognition to call someone on your mobile, just enough to recognize a trigger sound and the name of the person you want to call. This is how I could use voice recognition on my Nokia N73 to call anyone in my address book.
As I understood it the hard thing isn’t converting speech to text, it is understanding which text should lead to which actions.
Strangely enough in command line interfaces this works perfectly, so maybe we need just a more speech friendly way to call commands?
And why you’d need the cloud is beyond me. A speech assistent that fails once you don’t have a internet connection is not only annoying, in some cases it could become outright dangerous.
With a limited set of commands and fairly strict user training, you reduce this problem to "parsing a limited grammar" which is significantly easier. It's more or less what the current top-tier chatbots are doing. You don't need an outrageous amount of processing power for this.
The reason everything currently runs "in the cloud" is very simple; it binds you to the vendor and prevents anyone from reverse-engineering the software in any sort of usable form. It's essentially DRM gone wild.
I agree. I suspect most people would be a lot happier with a dozen or two commands customized to their personal use cases.
Instead we have companies shuffling data back to their servers attempting (and usually failing in my experience) to handle arbitrary commands mostly for the company's benefit
Google Assistant DID figure out which case should lead to which actions. It knew that it was supposed to call home.
Instead of performing the action, it refused to perform the action and demanded that I use my hands to unlock the phone in precisely the situation where doing so was both illegal and dangerous.
You're right about the spurious cloud connection requirement. There is no way that we need to make a cloud connection for this or many other functions, yet it seems to be the default architecture for almost everyone these days. Just because you can does not mean you should.
It is then refusing to do the action because they decided that I need to unlock my phone, PRECISELY in the situation where I CANNOT use my hands to perform that action.
Also, I last summer had an opportunity/need to use an obsolete DragonDictate from circa 2009. This old software was FAR better at recognition and well-thought-out command flow than any of Microsoft's or Googles current offerings. Yes. it is hard, but doing better than a decade behind is not hard.
So, both your general premise and your specific characterization are wrong
Why would they ever not use this data adversely against customers? Insurance companies already have offered an OBD tracker that would supposedly be used to prove you were a safe driver and therefore lower your rates. Why on earth would they not use this data to say "well you check twitter on the highway every morning, therefore we are raising your monthly payments by 20%." This is the entire insurance industry business model.
It seems like Zendrive is something you can integrate on your apps. Their target market seems to be companies that have fleets to manage, like Uber or DHL.
From Zendrive's FAQ page[1]:
> How does it work?
> Zendrive measures driver safety using only phone sensors. Integrate the Zendrive SDK into your driver app, and we’ll measure your drivers’ Caution, Control, and Focus while on the road, as well as detect collisions. This is done by measuring a wide variety of safety factors, like speeding, hard brakes, sharp accelerations, phone use, swerving, length of time driving, time of day, and many many more.
> Who’s it for? How are people using this?
> We built Zendrive for any On Demand company with a growing fleet, to help them manage their growth. With in-depth analysis showing any particular driver’s safety, or fleet-wide safety, it gives fleet managers the tools they need to improve their fleet’s driving to ensure safety, reduce risk and liability, and increase savings.
> Since launch we’ve found additional types of companies getting value from Zendrive, from fleet management platform companies, to activity tracking companies and expense tracking companies who use the driving detection in the technology, to hardware companies looking for new safety features.
Well, I doubt they'll reject clients based on the use they intend to give to their product, but I can't really fault them for that. It seems like a legitimate business. Hardly unethical.
Perhaps we could imagine better privacy laws. The fact that something is legal, and a legitimate business, doesn't mean that it's good or should be allowed.
Most (all?) of their examples in the FAQ are related to corporate drivers, not individuals. Something like Uber would be a bit of a gray area since you use your own vehicle, but all the others are more like DHL and FedEx, where you're driving a company-provided vehicle and there should be no expectation of privacy in regards to how you operate that vehicle.
Those are the examples given, but that wouldn't explain the huge numbers claimed elsewhere - nearly a quarter of phones in the US. Pardon me for not assuming that a data gathering corporation has my best interests at heart.
This is the closest the article comes to answering that:
> The reason for all this data is that at least one in five U.S. auto insurance policies now offers a potential discount if the customer consents to a vehicle monitor.
But I would also like some kind of affirmation that the software isn't being backdoored onto everyone's phones.
I thought those were typically GPS loggers that were powered by (and pulled data from) the OBDII port[1]? An app-based alternative could have some of the same info, though presumably less accurate acceleration and braking data.
I immediately wondered that as well. In the best case, insurers are giving people a discount to install an app, like health insurers handing out connected fitness monitors. That's creepy, but only mildly so by today's standards. However, I recently renewed my car insurance with a popular company, and they didn't ask me to install an app, so that seems unlikely.
I wouldn't be surprised if it were silently bundled into a bunch of apps that have location access and run in the background. It gives insurers vaguely-useful data, but mostly exists to hoover up sweet, sweet location data.
EDIT: See below[1,2]. It's the extra-creepy version.
It seems like another good follow-up question might be: how do we know zendrive's characterization of phone-use-while-driving is accurate and represents danger?
E.g., how does the thing know if you're driving or simply a passenger (especially on mass transit, like a bus)? And even if you are the driver, checking your phone at a light is probably not especially unsafe (though it could be rude or illegal). Finally, audio output app use like Maps or Spotify that doesn't require input is probably acceptable. So without knowing more about the methodology, the conclusions of the article don't logically follow.
I believe that this is the same app I encountered on my mother's phone. She got it from Verizon and got a discount on either mobile service or the phone. It has a bluetooth dongle that plugs into the cars OBDII port. I tried talking to her about the privacy implications though I don't think I got through to her. From what I could see the app was slurping the location of the phone all the time, even outside the car.
That sounds more like the car insurance schemes to give a discount by sharing your data. Are you sure she didn't opt into that? Just curious as first I've heard of such a thing outside of auto insurance.
I suppose the safest method would be to switch off a phone, or switch it to airplane mode, while driving. Would a requirement to use such an app while driving prevent that approach?
You can use an app like Offline Maps & Navigation that doesn't require the internet (after downloading the required maps)... and I think that Google Maps allows you to bring navigation instructions offline.
Sure, that's possible. But that means foregoing traffic alerts and redirections.
And it means you can't share your location with other people so they can track your progress. I do this on long trips so the people I'm driving to can see where I am without having to contact/disturb me.
Sure there are trade-offs, but anyways, I guess this app could be recording all the tracking data onto internal memory until you switch airplane mode back off and then transfer it to the insurance company.
Just bin case anyone needs a datapoint on whether or not Zendrive is a creepy data mining and privacy-invasive kind of company...
When I went to their website, I was soon greeted with a chatbot that asked":
"Welcome $myCompanyName! What brought you here to check us out?"
I've never visited them before. I'm at an office that shares an internet facing IP address with another company (I might go ask one of them to visit the site, to see if they've just linked that IP address to the company I work for, or if they're even creepier than that...)
That data is essentially sourced from clearbit afaik.
I'm really interested in who is selling it; I've been puzzling over this for a while. Lots of companies have high accuracy employer to IP address data like that -- think GSuite, Office 365, etc -- but who on earth has an incentive to sell it? In the case of GSuite, google keeps data like that for itself. For Office365, the value of the data pales next to the $100/year/user they charge.
One guess is maybe the Adobe suite? Still, I kind of think this would be too sleazy for them.
Let me walk back that "too sleazy for Adobe" -- too sleazy for my guess for the $ on offer. The money probably is not large; maybe low to mid 6 figures tops. That type of money probably can't even get you a callback from a BD person at Adobe; they don't get out of bed for under a million dollars.
Considering clearbit started at a time when there was not so much focus on privacy and customer data protections... I’m gonna take a wild guess here and say they are scraping it from publicly available (ish) sources.
That is discounting the obvious possibility of looking at ARIN allocations, where in some cases the IP address might be registered to an ASN belonging to the company. In that case it’s a simple lookup.
I got a generic message for a different company than these 18. I think those are tailored messages and they're doing some other kind of profiling to predict which company the person is visiting from.
My insurance company had me install their app to rate my driving for a couple of weeks. I asked them how they knew I was the one driving the car, they basically said "we can tell with technology and science". This was an unsatisfactory answer to me, because I really don't see how they can tell the difference between when my phone is in my pocket when I'm driving, and when my phone is in my pocket and I'm the passenger.
If they can't tell whether you are the drive or the passenger, it seems like their data on distracted driving would be extremely tainted.
FWIW, it's actually possible to determine driver vs passenger side of the car based off accelerometer data (even in pocket). I actually prototyped an app that used accelerometer data to detect phone usage while driving, and that came up during my investigative research. Sadly, my company never followed through on plans to file patents and develop it (this was back in 2012).
The data and interpretations are pretty cool though. We came up with signatures for texting, talking (both phone to ear and holding in hand for speaker), and a few other common activities.
Not saying they are doing anything like this, just that it is possible.
That you could detect that in pocket is kind of mind blowing. I guess minor differences in movement related to operating the vehicle versus sitting passively produces an identifiable signature?
Consider the arc of a typical turning radius from vehicles of varying widths. There would be slight variances in 3d space between a sensor on the left and right sides, obviously, depending upon the direction of the turn. It will be sharper on the sensor if it's on the side of the direction of the turn. Inferring the direction of a turn in an accelerometer is trivial, and inferring the side of the vehicle, and distance from the wheels (front vs back seat) should also be possible. Again, throw a sensor into a vehicle once, and it's hard to tell, but lots of times, you'll get enough data to easily tell.
More so, especially if you know the type of vehicle someone owns. Without knowing the type of vehicle, you would need data from both sides to differentiate between passenger and driver. But it should be trivial to detect the gradient (slope) of the sensor curve while the vehicle is turning either direction to determine whether a passenger is on the left or the right side. Doubly so with more than two dimensions of measurements available (vehicles normally sway a bit on one side or the other while turning one direction or the other). Simple physics that every suspension will follow... Your body will also sway a bit in three dimensions differently if the phone is on your person. Using these principles, you could also determine whether someone was siting in the front or the back, too. Knowing the type of vehicle, or given enough variance in measurements (more data points is better), it should be possible to infer the position of the sensor due to the gradient of the arc in the turning radius.
Nah,should be trivial to determine your location from cell network and infer which side the driver is on if they know what kind of vehicle you have insured. ;)
Obviously, it's inference though, it's not 100% accurate, and it doesn't have to be.
I don't think their is such thing as a typical turning radius. On a left turn some people go wide and clip the turning lane of the perpendicular street, others go very sharp and turn at the last minute to the point of overshooting the left slightly. Sometimes it changes if there's another car in that perpendicular turning lane, or if there is traffic and you have to gun it on green to get through, or if the box is blocked, or if there's a box in the road you have to dodge, or a rideshare blocking half the lane dealing with a passenger, etc. etc.
The difference is actually from movement of getting into the vehicle. I don't remember the details of that specific research but I did find it really cool at the time. IIRC, there was also (separate) research that could determine front seat/back seat, based off movement generated from the car turning.
"signatures", but how good were they? I'd not be surprised if you could do much better than random guesswork, but I'd need to see a lot more data to accept that this is good enough to be scaled up population-wide.
I would imagine bluetooth would most likely be connected if you're the driver.
If they can get the bluetooth id of the car you're paired with, maybe they could say "this is the common car driven".
And if they had location information, they might be able to match it offline to other data, like a license plate as you drove past a license plate reader.
and if they don't have any of that, maybe I should shut up because now they have ideas.
> I would imagine bluetooth would most likely be connected if you're the driver.
I would think the opposite. When I'm the passenger, I connect to Bluetooth so I can control the music and navigation. It makes no sense for the driver to do that.
I'm perfectly content for a phone to detect via GPS/IMU that it's in a moving vehicle and send up a big angry prompt like "Please confirm that you are a passenger and not driving this vehicle. Phone interactions are being logged and will be available to law enforcement if a collision occurs."
I say this as a bike commuter who sees phones being used at stoplights every day, and as a parent of kids who walk to school. But also has a driver who occasionally fiddles with Google Maps on the road and could use the reminder myself.
> I say this as a bike commuter who sees phones being used at stoplights every day
Why is this a problem? I don't mess with my phone while I'm driving, but if I'm sitting at a light for a minute or two, I'll take a peek if, say, a text message came in while I was moving, just to make sure it isn't something important from my wife or daughter.
I was nearly hit by the driver behind me moving forward when the vehicle next to them moved forward and they lurched forward with them. They were looking at their phone, I'd guess they saw the neighbor moving and thought it was a green light and time to go. Fortunately they had enough space and hit their brakes in time.
I've become cautious about taking my foot off the brakes for the same reason. Even when it's safe for me to start rolling, I don't trust them to not hit their accelerator when they're on the phone and notice my vehicle moving away from them.
A peek is probably safe enough, but using a phone is not.
I was bumped by a car behind me in the exact same situation. I looked in my rearview mirror and immediately saw the cell phone in her hand. What made this particularly amusing was when we got out of our cars to assess any potential damage, I realized the woman only had one arm. Fortunately there was no damage — especially since I was in a rental car and wasn't looking forward to the insurance rigamarole.
I am now similarly cautious about such "false starts" — I try not to start rolling until I think I'll be able to continue smoothly accelerating to normal speeds.
If your answer to "Why is it bad to use a phone when stopped?" is "Some drivers use phones while moving, causing accidents.", then that's not a very strong argument.
Maybe "take a peek" works for you, but it doesn't for most people. Most people's "peek" becomes "dash off a quick reply" and then "hang on let me fix that typo", "oops green light, let me just stab the send button while I start rolling forward", and "shoot I exited the app without sending now I'm in moving traffic and full on using my phone."
> Why is this a problem? I don't mess with my phone while I'm driving, but if I'm sitting at a light for a minute or two, I'll take a peek if, say, a text message came in while I was moving, just to make sure it isn't something important from my wife or daughter.
Because you have things to concentrate on while stopped at the lights. Has that pedestrian crossing the road made it across or are they about to step out in front of you? Did you notice the cyclist overtaking on the inside that is now in your blind spot? Is the intersection in front of you clear or are you about to cause gridlock?
Not killing people is far more important than whatever message your wife or daughter sent, if that was truly important I'm sure you've got time to pull over.
If these folks aren't directly in front of your vehicle or running deep reds, you aren't going to collide with them when you have a green light and travel forwards. If you lane change, you need to do it outside of intersections and check your mirror / blind spot, like always.
If the car in front is 50cm further from the gutter then a cyclist can easily be in a blind spot that's directly in front of your vehicle, especially a higher and less transparent vehicle like a delivery van. If that van is 50cm in front of you then you can easily miss someone still crossing the road, like an elderly person that can't walk fast enough, if you were paying attention you have a much higher chance of being aware of them.
If you aren't willing to be attentive then you shouldn't be trusted to operate heavy machinery.
If you have a tall vehicle with a front blind spot, then of course. I didn't think that was the general topic of the conversation so I didn't cover that. Passenger cars typically don't have front blindspots large enough to hide a person standing.
I'd love to see car drivers that talk about Cell phone use being fine try to do that while operating a motorcycle.
I truly believe anybody driving should at least once drive both a smaller vehicle (such as a motorcycle) and a large one (such as a truck) - to get different perspectives on what the road is like. It's the same road, so it's important to understand.
I ride a motorcycle, and I don't really have any issue with people using their phones at a red light. There's effectively nothing I would be doing on my bike either. I would look at my mirrors to check if a car might not see my and rear-end me, but in California I filter up to the front which eliminates this risk.
I've ridden a motorcycle and bicycle in traffic many times, for what it's worth, and driven a U-haul truck once or twice. I don't think cell phone use while moving is generally acceptable -- just stopped.
I bike to work through gridlock and if you bike smart it's really not the hellscape people make it out to be. Filter on reds to the front so people on the opposite lane about to gun the left see you, and take your lefts by pulling over in front of the perpendicular lane and just go straight on the light change, then all you really have to worry about is potholes damaging your rim and your eyes can stay fixed forward. I was so happy to learn that left turn 'hack,' I haven't had to change a lane since, or check my mirror for that matter.
I have seen close calls by other bikers but they are either 1) riding their bike like they are in the suburbs (in other words, they might as well be deaf and blind), 2) clearly highly followed on Strava with vibrant tight neoprene and riding like its a closed course in the countryside, or 3) fixed gear prick skid stopping and aggressively weaving all over traffic with a Bluetooth speaker and calf tattoos. If you see any of these bikers, keep your distance.
Occasional gridlock for my commute (London) and it often is the hellscape I make it out to be because, uh, that's the hellscape I'm experiencing - pedestrians will step out without looking, even if you're ringing a bell; taxis will change lanes without warning; there's a large number of construction lorries with blind spots; and many drivers don't understand the concept of "leave room".
> but they are either [stereotypes]
Alas, I am none of those stereotypes (although I do ride a single gear, it's not fixed.)
And all of that only matters in the moments just before you hit the gas. All but the last two seconds before the light change you are just sitting on your hands day dreaming. No need to be so obtuse.
If you can't wait, and put away easy to dodge distractions, you should not be driving. For most people, driving is the single most dangerous thing you will do today, with the highest risk of you causing death.
While I believe that is technically illegal in many jurisdictions, I agree a quick peek is fine.
What I routinely see, though, is folks with their heads solidly down and noses buried in their phone. Just in the past week I've seen two folks _watching video_ on their phones while I was bike commuting. This is terrifying.
And sure, not everyone peeking at their phones at full stops will also be looking while they're moving. But folks who look at their phones while moving will definitely be looking at full stops, too.
For a while due to a bike trail closure, I pedaled across the Sellwood bridge. Because reasons, I took the south sidewalk and had a great view of oncoming eastbound drivers. I saw many drivers holding/operating their phones, by my limited data it was around 1 in 10. Terrifying.
Yep, that is an unjustified risk. On the other hand, people would also hold a map draped over the steering wheel or beside them. That relates directly to the operation of the vehicle and is in fact needed to operate the vehicle, so it is justified.
The same distinction should apply with phones. Browsing the news and playing games is not OK. The risk is unjustified because it is not necessary to operate the vehicle. Running a map program is justified. The alternative would be something awful, such as parking right on the freeway to look for directions.
It also depends on how you're operating the phone for necessary operation.
Looking at your phone propped in front of you on a windshield or dash-mounted holder is fine. Looking down at your phone in the center cupholder while still driving is not fine, and I've had the unfortunate experience of almost being in accidents because the rideshare driver is doing something that dangerous.
Because when the light goes green zombie drivers looking at their phone move forward without checking that it is safe to do so.
You need to be aware of your surroundings ... including the (motor)bike who has just carefully manoeuvred his/her handlebar past your wing mirror, so you don't punt them into the ground. This is why we have laws, tests, licences!
Well, when I'm behind someone fiddling with their phone and it takes them an extra five seconds to start moving (and only because I beeped my horn to prompt them to look up), I think it's a problem. We're all trying to get to our destinations safely and quickly. This means traffic has to flow, or we all sit around longer getting more aggravated about it.
This is a fair sentiment, but I'm much more concerned about the safety implications than the inconvenience caused by a five second delay. The same delay can come from lots of legitimate sources— weather conditions, road work, delaying passing a cyclist because there isn't room to give the full meter, stopping for a schoolbus, whatever. When we're in a mindset that the smallest delay is intolerable, it becomes harder to be patient in the cases where slowing your vehicle is actually the safer choice (which, of course, is most of them).
I feel that this problem is self-correcting, since you will get beeped at every time (reliable negative reinforcement) and no one actually wants to sit at a green light, so there's no selfish incentive involved.
I do the same, but please think of the people behind you. If you ever fail to react to traffic in front of you going immediately, you have just wasted several minutes of the lives of everyone behind you, as far back as the backup goes (for example at a traffic light). I'm EXTREMELY diligent, but some folks apparently have no concern for others.
Horns are safety features. They are meant for avoiding an accident, not for venting frustration. Here in California at least, using your horn because you’re feeling impatient at a green light is illegal. (Granted, so is using your phone while stopped in traffic, but that doesn’t make you in the right for honking.)
When safety is involved, yes. Laws vary by state, and of course enforcement varies even more, but the law in California is quite clear; horns are explicitly not a general purpose signaling device.
not a californian, so I can't speak to the laws there, but I don't see anything wrong with a quick tap on the horn to let the person know they missed the light change. in my view, this is communication, not mere venting. I would never give someone the full blast unless they were actively doing something unsafe.
that said, people expect to go when the light turns green. violating people's expectations as always at least a little dangerous on the road. they should know better, but they don't.
I live in California now. From my experience people are quicker with the horn in bigger metro areas. There's always the one guy who has no patience - although I try to keep in mind that person might be justified in trying to get to a hospital or some other emergency.
But generally there is a progression to events which follows what one would expect when walking:
1- Polite "excuse me mis/sir/mam" - tap on the honk
2- Louder "EXCuse ME mis/sir/mam" - double tap/one a little louder
3- Very loud "EXCUSE ME PLEASE?" - loud honk
Inevitably, a significant percentage of the time I see this, the person that is being inconsiderate and blocking traffic/a doorway will be annoyed at the person trying to move around. I wonder if there is a study as to the percentage of the population that has this type of reaction.
Horn honking is like a language. I doubt very many people are leaning on their horn when the person ahead of them is taking too long to take off from a light. Usually this is communicated through short, almost staccato honks from the horn. To communicate "shit you're about to crash" people lay on the horn. I don't think the honks used to wake up people dozing off at a green like are being mistaken for safety honks.
Several minutes? If you wait 3 seconds then you would have to have more than a hundred people stopped directly behind you to get that far!
And that's assuming the entire pack of cars doesn't just catch back up to the one in front of you, where you had to wait anyway, dropping the actual time loss back to about zero.
If it prevents two or three cars from making the light you were both in together, you’ve needlessly made those specific cars wait for an entire additional cycle...in heavy traffic, it’s bad for everyone when as many vehicles as possible don’t make it through the pipe, as it slows down the entire congested apparatus further.
You do realize even if it is 'about zero'... any amount of time needlessly taken from other humans against their consent isn't cool right?
Minutes? 3 seconds? Whatever. No one has a right to other people's time. I can't help but feel that anything else is a sense of entitlement over other peoples time.
That's not to say someone should blare their horn after 3 seconds, but definitively a tap or two... and if that doesn't work, then get progressively louder.
Nobody can drive perfectly with .01 second precision at all times. It's not entitlement to aim for "good driver" without being a neurotic mess about every time you slow down or don't take the first gap. And I think the logical conclusion of having absolutely no right to anyone else's time is to not take up space on the road at all.
And when I say "about zero" I mean that it can in fact be exactly zero.
That is why there is an expectation of you paying attention. Including during a red light. That means not using your phone.
I can assure you, if you are using your phone at a red light, it takes more than 0.01 seconds to notice the change in light, put the phone down, look at the street in front of you to make sure there isn't anything new since the last time you looked and go. In fact, if it took you the 0.01 seconds you say, it would literally be impossible for someone to honk you in time before you take off. The amount of time quoted is mind mindbogglingly small.
I don't get honked at. When I'm at a red light, I'm paying attention. If I need to use my phone, I pull over. Therefore, when a light changes I generally move along as quick as possible. If for some reason something falls in my car, I'm having a conversation with someone next to me or I get distracted (happens once or twice a year) and someone honks, I defer to them, since I know I'm in the wrong by not being on the ball.
I defer because I have no entitlement over the time of the person behind me. I'm not making up excuses saying how little time it is. I understand it's wrong of me to impose on them unnecessarily. Using your phone while driving is not
necessary. It's all very logical. Basically:
My pleasure < Their Right to not have people impose on their time.
I always find it strange when an issue isn't addressed but instead denied by making it seem small (generally with gross underestimations). I remember a coworker once got fired for stealing a box of pens. When caught he claimed "I didn't steal, it was just a box of pens! It's basically worth nothing." - I think the boss actually fired him for giving that argument instead of owning the issue.
* Exceptions could be made for checking the traffic in GPS or some other activity that aids driving (knowing you need to change lanes with advance notice is important). Checking messages emails isn't one such activity, though I've seen a lot of friends and colleges do it much to my chagrin.
> I always find it strange when an issue isn't addressed but instead denied by making it seem small
That's not what I was doing at all. I was calling your standard impossibly high, using an intentionally minuscule number to show that every driver violates the idea that "any amount of time[...]isn't cool"
And obviously if you waste so much time you get honked at you've done something wrong. So far I've avoided being honked at for that reason.
But there are ways to use a phone that don't waste time! If you keep the cross light in view and put the phone down when it turns yellow, that's plenty of time to focus on the road situation.
Except... you are arguing against a cartoon of what I said. You even intentionally edited it out to make it seem like I am being unreasonable. I'll post your quote with the missing part included:
"amount of time needlessly"
Needlessly. An important part of what I said. If you aren't wasting peoples time needlessly, you are within my standard. Therefore, my standard isn't unrealist.
Let's be clear about the chain of events:
mikepurvis complains about cell phone use during red lights.
tasty_freeze posts saying: why is this an issue
rconti tries to take a middle ground by saying 'he does the phone checking at a red light to, but he is highly consious of other people and he notices that many who check it during a red light aren't as concious and implores other people to be so. He explains the chain effect of how a few seconds of your delay can cause several minutes of delay to other people.
Dylan16807, you, post how this knock on effect would only happen if there were 'more than a hundred people stopped directly behind' (as if that is impossible) Furthermore you state:
"And that's assuming the entire pack of cars doesn't just catch back up to the one in front of you, where you had to wait anyway, dropping the actual time loss back to about zero"
Which sounds a hell of a lot like denial through minimizing. So I post saying:
"even if it is 'about zero'... any amount of time needlessly taken from other humans against their consent isn't cool right?"
It seems like a statement you seem to agree to but haven't stated as much.
Instead, you edited my words to try and prove the point that I have 'unrealistic expectations'.
To me, it sounds like you feel like arguing. Though I might be missing your point, so feel free to clarify what that point is and how it is relevant to the chain of communication as originally posted and recaped on this post.
> Which sounds a hell of a lot like denial through minimizing.
At that point I was just calling out an exaggeration, which is not the same thing as denial. It might be possible in a very niche case, but "if you ever" portrays it as a typical result.
> So I post saying: "even if it is 'about zero'... any amount of time needlessly taken from other humans against their consent isn't cool right?"
You interpreted "about zero" in a different way than I meant it. You seemed to take it as a small amount in every case, when I meant that it could often actually be zero.
The difference is important, because you can make an argument that a small delay harms someone, but you can't make an argument that zero delay harms anyone.
> It seems like a statement you seem to agree to but haven't stated as much.
I agree that small delays can be harmful, but there's a threshold before I think we can assign blame.
> Instead, you edited my words to try and prove the point that I have 'unrealistic expectations'.
I'm sorry I omitted words. The omitted words don't change my argument. If you think they do, I think you're misunderstanding the argument.
"You do realize even if it is 'about zero'... any amount of time needlessly taken from other humans against their consent isn't cool right?"
Every time someone drives they waste some amount of others' time needlessly. Everyone, always.
When you said "any", were you using it in a non-literal sense? Or do you think other wastes of time are not "needless"?
If you answer "no" to both of those, then I think your standard is impossible, and you're holding phone-users to a higher standard than everyone else.
I'm really not trying to distort your view. If I'm still not understanding something, it's not on purpose, and I really welcome correction.
Please believe me. I did not have any intent to distort your statement when I removed those words. I did it to make it clearer what words I was focusing on. To me, "waste" implies "needlessly" in this context.
-
And then entirely separate from that, I assert that it's possible to use a phone while stopped without causing any delay, if done right.
Needlessly, definition: in a way that is unnecessary because it is avoidable.
Therefore this statement:
> every time someone drives they waste some amount of others' time needlessly
Is absolutely incorrect. Following good driving techniques means no needless wasted time happens when driving. By the very definition of the word needless. Anything that is within good driving techniques is needed. By the very definition of good driving techniques.
Since cell phone use to check messages (the point which you are answering to) is not needed to operate a motor vehicle, IF time is wasted on this (again, the point you are literally hitting reply to), any amount, it is a needless imposition on other people. As someone who can communicate effectively pointed out, this has a knock on effect. (again, the point you are replying to)
Using words by their actual meaning helps communication. Playing games and saying 'driving is not needed' is a silly ego defense that doesn't further the understanding of reality and the finding of truth. Especially because there are people who clearly need to drive. And the who point that was being made was 'when driving', not if driving is needed.
This is all very basic.
BTW, in the middle of the hair splitting defensive posting, you forgot to clarify what the point you were making when replying to rconti - because that is the topic we are supposed to be on.
I am not getting any deeper into a semantics argument.
> you forgot to clarify what the point you were making when replying to rconti - because that is the topic we are supposed to be on
"At that point I was just calling out an exaggeration, which is not the same thing as denial. It might be possible in a very niche case, but "if you ever" portrays it as a typical result."
I think that's about all I have to say so uh good luck in life!
Don't get me wrong, I bike too. I also have little faith that this sort of system will be implemented effectively and transparently. I also don't think it should be legal in the first place to gather this kind of data without informed consent (no, TOS doesn't count). There's so much going on in industry that an IRB wouldn't touch, and that's where I think we need more regulation.
(I also think we need change-lanes-to-pass bills, better bike infrastructure, more regulation on car infotainment systems, and GOOD approaches to punishing and preventing distracted driving).
"Please confirm that you are a passenger and not driving this vehicle. Phone interactions are being logged and will be available to law enforcement if a collision occurs."
Clicking OK on that dialog box sounds like informed consent to me.
"CITIZEN, phone interactions are being logged and will be available to law enforcement."
maybe I'm just one of those freedom-addled american cowboys, but I don't ever want to get a message like that from a device I own. save that for the computers at work or jail.
First, it's not clear to me that this is what is being proposed - instead, it sounds like the companies involved get their surveillance tech rolled into other apps like adware. Second, even if enrollment in the program was done more carefully (people shouldn't find out suddenly and in unfamiliar ways about intrusive technology), you'd REALLY want to study this to make sure that the jarring warning doesn't cause even more accidents.
I'm not against using technology to improve public safety, but I'm against half-assed ideas which would never hold up under reasonable peer or institutional review without a lot more careful consideration of safety and privacy.
It doesn't take a whole lot of effort to notice them looking down and slightly to the right, or very hard down.
Humans are good at noticing what other people are looking at, so it doesn't take more than a moment to figure out if someone's looking at something either than the road. From there, it's a relatively safe bet if they're not looking at the road, they're looking at this phone.
I see this all the time in a car, but maybe Ive trained myself to pay attention to this considering how many drivers use their phones while driving.
My phone already does that (well, the prompt at least, if not the legal warning). I bet it does little to deter someone who has decided they have some legitimate reason to look at their phone. Effectively it just adds another step so the distraction lasts even longer.
> "Please confirm that you are a passenger and not driving this vehicle. Phone interactions are being logged and will be available to law enforcement if a collision occurs."
So track people when they are the passenger, or are on a train? I'm not sure that strikes the right balance.
> I'm perfectly content for a phone to detect via GPS/IMU that it's in a moving vehicle and send up a big angry prompt like "Please confirm that you are a passenger and not driving this vehicle. Phone interactions are being logged and will be available to law enforcement if a collision occurs."
This makes sense if you sort of assume all trips are by car by default, but in places with mass transit this is a useless nuisance for people who mostly take the bus or train.
Or even between driving vs slowly rolling in traffic vs stopped?
I never really touch the phone at speed unless but stopped or slowly moving forward at 5kph? I’ll change music or check google maps for a better route ️
This is in some ways the worst because it's the speed at which everyone outside your vehicle assumes you're the most attentive and aware of your surroundings. It's the speed at which that kid playing in the street is most likely to "come out of nowhere" and end up under your wheel.
I've found that on the highway that someone in an adjacent lane is most likely to make a sudden lane change at very high or very low speeds. So at 5mph, from my experience, you're far more likely to encounter situations where you need to be paying attention than not when you're driving at low speeds on a highway.
So yeah, using your phone on the highway, in really any situation unless its park-and-sleep traffic, is kind of a dick move.
That's a good point. There are so many possible situations where a phone could be "safely" in use while the car is in motion, it would be really hard to use this information against the driver in almost any situation.
In fact, it seems the most likely explanation for Zendrive finding that the heaviest users of phones while in motion rated themselves as extremely safe — they just have bad data about who is actually driving.
like all great laws, it would hit the people trying to do the responsible thing hardest. why is it even close to acceptable than a man and his wife doing exactly the right thing should have to fight it in court to get their insurance payout?
Because less scrupulous people would say they were doing the right thing when they weren't, and in a capitalist society like ours we prefer to defend profits rather than make things easier for people who are innocent.
"The company doesn't work directly with services such as Uber and Lyft, but a number of apps, such as Sherpashare (which is primarily used by ride-hailing drivers for services like Uber and Lyft), HopSkipDrive, eDriving and a variety of navigation apps use Zendrive's technology to monitor ride safety."
Hurray for malware. What other apps is this hiding in?
It should be treated in the same class as driving while drinking. If you are in an accident that involved your phone usage you have to put your phone in a box before you can start your car or some similar mechanism to the in car breathalyzer.
I am the only person in my family I know that doesn't use my phone while driving. Something I don't think has been addressed here is that there is much less social pressure on people to not use phones while driving. Nobody would let someone drive a car if they knew they are drunk but many people allow others to use their phone while being the driver.
In Spain the fine for drunk driving between 0.25 and 0.50 is the same as the fine for driving while on the phone: 600€ + 6 points off your driver's license.
When will American cities prioritize good public transportation? It would be interesting to see what the differences are compared to cities that do, such as Singapore, Vienna and London.
Depends on the city, most American cities aren't structured in a way that makes sense for public transportation. They are designed around the assumption of car ownership. And that still leaves the question of how to bridge the huge gaps between cities without cars.
The biggest US cities, like Chicago and NYC, have pretty great public transportation.
I disagree. It will be when Ford and GM go bankrupt, and when foreign-owned auto manufacturers forget how US lobbying works.
Then wait for about 40 years as the people in power continue to do things exactly as they had been done before, just because no one ever got fired for keeping the applecart upright. Then the US will go all in on public transportation and walkable urban centers.
While the data itself is valuable and shows worrying trends, its collection makes me even more worried.
If this trend of us collecting datapoints for every muscle twitch continues, we will not be needing a "right to not incriminate oneself" any more, our devices will be the ultimate provers of our guilt. We sign off our freedom for... what? 10 bucks a month savings in car insurance and "you're a Captain Picard!" in a facebook "which Trek character are you" dumbass quiz?
> The call ended abruptly when Balakrishnan—talking on a hands-free system—was rear-ended at a red light.
So the expert was doing something that has been demonstrated to be nearly as distracting.
I am very skeptical of this recent study. Yes, it’s good that drivers are looking forward instead of at their laps, but a good driver is looking all around and making risk calculations about people and cars not directly in front of them.
As a society, we've already dealt with an experience that is "addictive" where people "can't help themselves": drunk driving.
Societal pressure plus draconian penalties has put an end to omnipresent drunk driving. The same will work for distracted driving... but only if society decides to take action.
or we could try a less authoritarian approach and work to improve technologies like android auto and apple carplay that allow drivers to take advantage of the useful features of their phones without taking their eyes off the road.
Have you used any of those on a car which didn’t require using a touchscreen while driving? I have boggled at recent rentals after seeing how far car UIs have regressed over the last decade – so many things require you to move your hands to controls which cannot be used without looking, are extremely fiddly, or pull your attention away from the road.
Toss in the studies showing that handsfree usage doesn’t lower the distraction factor and I’m wondering whether the answer is banning anything short of a full HUD and that only for navigation.
I personally don't find it that bad to have to hit the voice command button on screen a couple of times per drive. for me it's once to start navigation and once to start my music, both of which I can do before leaving my parking space. it's a valid point though, touchscreen UIs are inherently less safe in a car, imo. bmw/mercedes/audi have much better controls where you can control all the systems through a wheel/paddle near the gearshifter but I'm not sure whether they are hooked up to android auto or carplay. in any case, all I'm really arguing is that it isn't that hard to devise a system that's as safe or safer than operating an old school radio. as I argue in a different post, having real-time traffic info is a huge win for safety. I would prefer to see that approach tried at scale before we jack up punishments or create a pervasive surveillance system.
I think the problem is that most manufacturers don’t want to spend time on good UI. I got a 2019 Ford earlier and it was like “hit the voice button, say something, wait, use the touchscreen to cancel the modal error dialog, try again, cancel the hilarious misinterpretation, try again, …”. I am unsurprised that people use the phone directly since the only thing which worked at all well was the sound output and Google maps display.
If it were up to me I’d ban touchscreens in the front row: voice or, better, buttons & knobs with distinct tactile feel, and the display has to be the same level as the instrument console and limited to navigation & basic info display. I think that’d avoid a lot of crashes but I imagine it’d get too much negative reaction until the toll of distracted driving is widely recognized, just as drunk driving took many years of awareness.
I don't disagree with anything you say here. tactile buttons with a quality screen isn't just safer, it's a better experience. I doubt people would miss the touchscreens for long.
That would be an interesting study — I would not be surprised that music & conversation have different impacts — but my main thought was just that it's important to measure the total distraction factor rather than just assuming it's sufficient not to require people to look at something. I'd want to carefully test whether a voice UI was actually better or if the distraction of dealing with marginal speech recognition, any concept of state/menus, etc. was still enough to qualify as a risk.
It's an option on many cars now, but Subaru has been somewhat late to the party - I know that Impreza got it in 2017, and Outback and some other cars in 2018. Looks like Forester only got it this year.
not sure without doing some research but android auto is a standard feature in my base 2017 gti.
android auto is honestly kind of frustrating from a UX perspective but I'd argue the voice controlled music app is safer than fiddling with a radio/cd player and integrated google maps lets me know ahead of time when I'm about to hit a slowdown on the highway so I can be ready to hit the brakes earlier.
Smartphones are the cigarettes of this generation — expensive, addictive, unhealthy, and heavily pushed by big business.
Thirty years from now, people will look back on this time and wonder what the hell we were thinking. (The answer, of course, is that we weren't, because we were too distracted by our phones to do so.)
You can look at comics from the past and see what people of the time thought the big problem was. In the 80s, walkmans were going to be the death of humanity. In the 1900s, people reading the newspaper instead of talking to random strangers around them was going to be the death of humanity.
The common thread is that people do not like being bored, but some boring things are required each day. We filled the idle time with newspapers, music, and now reading newspapers and listening to music on our phones. It's nothing new. I am not worried.
The underlying problem is that commute times are too long for people to remain attentive to the mind-numbingly boring task of driving. That is what we should focus on fixing.
One more reason to run your own VPN with something like PiHole to monitor, connect your phone to this VPN, and then block all shitty traffic like this.
Since this might be in Uber and Lyft apps, I wonder if disabling those apps till I need them will solve this issue.
However, in n-years time, when all insurance companies will start using this data openly and stupid politicians will pass laws to allow this, what will happen to all the privacy conscious people, will they even be able to buy insurance as reasonable rates?
I hope they do and I hope they do something about it. Distracted driving is a really bad idea, and you should not be touching your phone while you are driving.
While that might be nice, the insurance companies spying on me is very distasteful. Alas we've traded the governement's unreasonable search and seizure for private search and seizure as time as gone on.
I disagree. I think every single car should be tracked at all times. They are killing machines, responsible for 40,000 deaths a year in the US directly, more than gun deaths.
Yeah, as someone who sees people drive past, staring at their phones, as I ride my bike around... I don't have a ton of sympathy. It's a privilege, not a right.
No, the roads belong to everyone not just motorists, building a cyclist ghetto and kicking cyclists off the roads so that motorists can have them all for themselves is just wrong. Motorists should be responsible for their actions.
They do, but we still build sidewalks for pedestrians. If you want more biking, you need to make people feel safe to do so, and many do not feel safe being next to cars driven by angry people inches away from them.
You can make a road with a protected bike lane after all.
I’ve been a bike commuter too and if it’s any consolation whatsoever, I just want to let you know that if you see me with my cell phone on my steering while driving, it’s because I have my navigation app open and I want it in my peripheral vision so I can be attentive to the road.
I was thinking about that today when a android update prompt took my screen view in hostage. I am using the phone as a GPS. Hopefully I knew the road very well but I would have been forced to stop the car in any other situation.
Aside from highly localized municipal efforts, the only way anything is going to be done about this is a top-down approach from the federal government. PR campaigns need to be conducted, funds for LEO training/equipment to conduct stings need to be allocated, all that. This needs to make going after drunk driving look like a drop in the barrel. As much as I hate wanting to expand the influence of our law enforcement bodies, I don't see any other way out of this epidemic.
You don't need to be touching your phone _while driving_ to do those things. Set them up before you leave your parking spot and use a robust mount so you can safely glance at the GPS without fiddling.
Turn your phone off (or at least on silent/do not disturb) and put it either in the back seat or the seatback pocket before getting behind wheel. Get a Garmin offline GPS for navigation.
If you want entertainment like music, audiobooks, or podcasts you can get a cheap, basic MP3 player and load it up before car trips and plug it into the aux input. Though, honestly, this might not be necessary as long as the phone is out of reach and alerts are off/on silent; so a phone with notifications disabled bluetooth streaming podcasts from the back seat should be fine.
The important thing is its entirely out of your reach and you don't hear the notifications.
This recent trend of calling everything addictive and normalizing this misuse is not only stupid but also dangerous to society at large. Addiction is a serious thing with a well defined meaning. By applying it to things that are just actually rewarding, as opposed to things that hijack the reward system via direct manipulation to skew responses to predicted reward, it creates a perception of danger.
This perception of danger then allows for the conversation about real issues that need solutions (usually education) to bottom out and begin calls for the use of government violence to prevent people from doing what they want. Encouraging the use of force against people who haven't done any violence or fraud themselves is a very bad thing.
The circumstances have to justify it. Misuse of the word addiction helps that false justification.
> Addiction is a serious thing with a well defined meaning.
Yes, and that meaning applies fully to smartphone apps for many people.
> By applying it to things that are just actually rewarding, as opposed to things that hijack the reward system via direct manipulation to skew responses to predicted reward
Again, this applies to apps as much as it does to cigarettes. In both cases, you do get a short-term sensation of reward followed by regret and negative long-term consequences.
There is a big difference between something that gives you pleasure and then create a bad habit and an actual addiction.
What you are doing is the equivalent of saying that it's fine to play video games late because "people are addicted to it". Most people aren't. They simply have deep rooted bad habits. Playing Flappy Bird every time you commute isn't an addiction. Wanting to finish your level before logging off isn't either.
An addiction is when your mind is always focused on the addictive behavior. You have an urge than can never be fulfilled. It's a shifting goalpost because your tolerance increases as you spent more and more time attempting to satisfy the urges. It gets so bad it takes over your life, become more important than your career and family.
Actual gambling, gaming & internet addictions are life breaking. People die from it [1][2][3]. Entire families get broken from addiction. People lose careers over it.
Recall that the article that spawned this discussion is talking about people using their phone while driving and the subsequent 15% rise in car fatalities in the past year.
Is the increase due to addicted people willingly risking their life an the lives of the people surrounding them or is it simply a bunch of people with bad habits living where the issue is not talked about enough? I look at education and laws around the world for the issue and my jaw often hit the floor. Either it's not talked about or doing won't get you in any trouble.
Where I live (Eastern Canada) they made it so that first offence is $600. Second offence double that. If the person is on a probationary licence then they lose it. Otherwise you lose 5 of your points in the demerits points system[1]. Repeat offenders lose their licence for up to a month.
They are investigating outright making it a criminal offence because the population consider the issue a serious one.
Not only are you not allowed to hold a phone you are also not allowed to have it in a cup holder. You can only use it if attached to the vehicle and for navigation or vehicle performance analytics features. They have cops driving in raised unmarked trucks and bus to spot drivers using phones.
We also saw at the same time an increase on government paid TV and radio ads educating about the issue.
Those measures made it so that according to surveys, "97% of adult Quebecers consider that distracted driving is a very serious or quite serious problem".
[1] Adults with full licenses have 15, young adult 12 and teens only 8. That means tha a teen who loses 5 points for having an active phone in the car will then lose their license for failing to obey a stop sign (-3 pts).
I read the second article and noticed that they have no idea what they are talking about. See,
> It stimulates neurotransmitter receptors in the brain’s reward center with a huge surge of dopamine — an organic feel-good chemical, or neurotransmitter.
They're still repeating the same old wives tales about the dopaminergic systems being related to feeling good. This was known to be false even back in the 1970s. They encode for reward incentive salience, not actual feelings of pleasure. Given this the entire rest of the article can be disregarded.
But, that leaves the actual study cited. This seems to be a 1000 person study of self reports of behavior by college students through text. Self reports are not going to tell you anything but the biases of the people involved.
And at the very most, if we accept this study's conclusions at face value then all they're saying is that people have built up habits relating to phones. Dependence. This is the word you want to use. It is definitely not addiction.
> Addiction is a brain disorder characterized by compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli despite adverse consequences. [...] The two properties that characterize all addictive stimuli are that they are reinforcing (i.e., they increase the likelihood that a person will seek repeated exposure to them) and intrinsically rewarding (i.e., they are perceived as being inherently positive, desirable, and pleasurable).
It is a psychological definition of addiction. It is all about compulsive behaviour of seeking for some stimuli and nothing about the hijacking of the reward system or use of government violence. What does it mean to hijack the reward system and how to demarcate it from "to be actually rewarding"? Is eating of high-carb food actually rewarding? You can get a lot of cheap calories this way.
Much of what is self-diagnosed as phone "addiction" is really some form of post-partum/separation anxiety-avoidance.
When you learn a behavior and reinforce it long enough, any disruption to that has a nasty tendency to "break" people. Take solitary confinement, or soldiers-- trained to lose their sense of self during boot camp and adopt a career specialty, a team identity and a surrogate "family" over the course of years and then get everything taken away due to RIFs. it's not just PTSD that contributes to veteran suicides.
With phones, we have entire generations who learn to swipe before they even know how to wipe. Kids and teenagers are on-call 24/7, ready to respond to meaningless notifications and updates anytime anybody on Earth does anything. Even in cases where they're being bullied to the point of suicide, they'll check in regularly for another dose of abuse until the bitter end. Go to a restaurant and count how many "couples" are on their respective phones instead of interacting with each other.
Our behavior is being shaped in ways our primitive understanding of psychology has yet to adapt to. Nobody is in a hurry to put down their phones because they're so connected the rest of the time, the isolation that follows is its own form of withdrawal.
Doesn't make it an addiction, but when compulsivity drives your behavior, you're not that far removed from it either.
> You’ll also lose your licence if you passed your driving test in the last 2 years. [Your licence will be cancelled (revoked) if you get 6 or more points within 2 years of passing your test.]
> The law still applies to you if you’re: stopped at traffic lights[,] queuing in traffic[, or] supervising a learner driver
In Oregon the fine is $1000, or $2000 if you're involved in a collision. We have the lowest distracted rates in the country. But really, people still do it a lot.
My commute in SV is entirely surface streets (by design). Since moving here I have observed what I call the "California stop": at a red light, drivers will stop 2-3 car lengths behind the next driver. Enough that a clever smart car driver could comfortably pull into the space.
Every time I see it, the driver is looking down at what I assume is a phone. They are so eager to get back to their phone they stop the car early.
heads up - a "California stop" is a driver rolling through a stop sign or red light. this is much different than an "Idaho stop", which is due to bicyclists in Idaho being allowed to treat stop signs as yield signs, and red lights as stop signs (now legal in Delaware as well).
not sure what the common nomenclature of what you described is though.
My guess is that distracted people just mirror what the person in front of them is doing. Like when you’re trying to change lanes and the person next to keeps matching your pace so you can’t get over either behind or in front of them.
Just bought car insurance, I asked the woman on the phone when I bought it "what do you do with this data? Are you selling it?" and she sounded somewhat incredulous that I would even ask such a thing. I declined even though they offered up to a 25% discount. I'll admit it was difficult to decline, even for as much as I care about privacy.
What's good about this is that it might allow a targeted solution (don't compose long texts or watch movies will driving) instead of taking away responsible people's ability to add a gas station stop to their trip, glance at some song lyrics in broad daylight with no traffic, or dictate voice notes while driving. The sense of responsibility that makes me slow down in bad conditions and leave a good following gap is plenty well tuned to make me a safe driver. The rules are needed by an entirely different class of people with less ability to imagine consequences and estimate risk.
Maybe I do need the rules to protect myself from those people, but I wish people wouldn't get into this moral panic as though touching a cell phone is the equivalent of blacking out your windshield.
In the long term, the incentive of "I must pay close attention to the light or I will have to wait another cycle" is much more powerful than "I might get another 15 seconds of phone use if I don't bother looking up from time to time". People need time to adjust to that weird red light scheme (or it needs to adjust to allow a longer gap just after turning green).
This is a completely misleading headline. The headline should be: "Insurers know how often Americans who voluntarily choose to carry spy-phones ("smart phones") are to look at their spy-phones while driving".
What's worse is that many people in the comment section of this article seem to be surprised that they are being tracked by the tracking devices they choose to carry.
Using your radio has been shown to be just as distracting or more distracting yet we allow that. Their is no data presented in the article that shows any even attempted casualty. For example, they note that usage of devices is up and yet fatalities are down: https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/us-dot-announces-2017-r...
And lest anyone claim this is due to safety items like advanced airbags, that same article shows _pedestrian_ fatalities are also down.
Now this could be for a host of factors. But the article isn't anything other than a scare fest and a reminder that anyone from FB talking about potential privacy issues should be shamed into silence.
I'd love to add this to an on phone blocker like Blockada [0] (tl;dr local VPN based HOSTS blocking app). Does anyone know if there's a) a way to verify that this SDK is installed on my phone and b) if it's using a shared / single set of hostnames for reporting so that they can be blocked?
Is there a chance that my insurance company's app is tracking this? Presumably an iOS app can't access accelerometer data when it isn't open (and it rarely is).
Gee, an insurance company asks people whether they drive safely, gets wildly optimistic responses, and concludes people have poor self-assessment. It's certainly possible (Dunning-Kruger syndrome) but a more likely explanation is they simply lie to avoid a possible rise in their premiums.
> The reason for all this data is that at least one in five U.S. auto insurance policies now offers a potential discount if the customer consents to a vehicle monitor.
"Zendrive now has its monitoring technology on 60 million phones, roughly one of every four U.S. drivers"
For example: How did this "monitoring technology" get on 60M phones? Do the owners know it's there? Is it hidden in other apps? Is there clear disclosure of its existence in those apps? What is done with this data? Who has access? Is it anonymized? Is it sold to third parties? Is it used for advertising or other non-safety-related purposes? How do they distinguish between drivers and passengers? What do they do about COPPA if it's on the phone of an under-13-year-old? Etc.